I Went to the Woods: The firefighter who fished

Published 9:30 am Saturday, May 2, 2026

Tom was the type of guy who had a fly rod spreadsheet. Not because he was pretentious, a collector or wanted to gloat; he was just meticulous and organized more than he was driven, type-A or compulsive.

He loved to grill and would crack open a Rainier and watch a show set in the West. Longmire. Yellowstone. He paid enough attention to the plot, but I wonder if the settings were just vessels that took him back to a river in Colorado or Wyoming.

It’s been a week since Tom has passed and I’m going through his fly fishing stuff. When cancer kills your dad and your mom, after years of being alone in the four-bedroom home of your youth, starts talking about another man, it’s conflicting. You want your mom to be happy and not feel lonely in a small town on an island in Southeast Alaska. But it also reminds you of the dad-shaped hole in your life.

After Tom visited Alaska and Mom spent more time in Colorado, something was obvious and Mom asked if I was okay with it.

“Of course.”

Mom’s happiness was the priority.

Tom and Mom had known each other since elementary school in Colorado and rekindled the friendship at a reunion. He was patient, handy and didn’t have the performative swagger of someone who feels the need to let everyone know whatever it is everyone needs to know.

I liked Tom a lot and I liked that his path joined Mom’s later in life.

I was in my mid 30s at the time and far more emotionally equipped to handle life’s emotional snags. So Tom came into my life as a retired man whose angling life was tapering. The more I looked through his things the more I realized how much I missed out on details of a man who lived a good, though difficult, life. In addition to the obvious generational differences, you can’t look into someone else’s angling archives and feel regret or assume everyone you know and love will have a stroke tomorrow morning and set up interrogations to ensure you get the facts before it’s too late. We talked a bit about fly fishing and told a few stories, but I never learned about his spots on the Poudre River.

His small angling library was filled with John Gierach who, like Tom, was at home on trout streams in the Colorado portion of the Rockies. He had vintage Lamson and Orvis reels, bamboo rods made with the meticulous hands of a gentleman who earned his living as a firefighter before retiring in 2007.

He is another lost link to a different Colorado. A Colorado that people who lived on both sides of the most recent population blow-up described as busy, but not crowded like now. The Colorado of the ’60s and ’70s was crowded compared to the previous generation, but it was still a generation that fished for the sake of fishing. It’s not hard to imagine the motives were cleaner since there was no social media to rot out the soul of so many fishing experiences. The same can be said about Alaska.

His gear reflects the move to Alaska, with all the newer rods and reels being stout enough for salmon. He and Mom moved to Arizona when they had finally had enough of hauling firewood, black ice and 120 inches of rain. His ‘24-’25 fishing license, his last, was in his vest.

I’ll end up donating some of the useful stuff to a local organization, but most of it will come with me back to Alaska. I won’t create a spreadsheet, but I’ll know when I’m fishing for Tom.

Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Amazon.com. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Juneau Empire.